I am not an expert on Sabarimala. I am not an expert on anything. If anything, I am a generalist. I dabble with whatever comes my way.
So for this post, I am exploring a question that may interest you as well:
Why does the Sabarimala tradition deem the presence of women within the fertile period of their life -which is concretised as menstruating- incompatible with what the deity there, Ayyappan, symbolises?
Let’s keep in mind that the motto of Sabarimala is: Tat Tvam Asi, or That thou art. It is the core state in the non-dualistic vision of life. According to this view, the difference between you and the rest is an illusion. All are one, not many. It is so, if you are one with Brahman, which is the benchmark of being spiritual.
Within this tradition, a sense of negativity crept in regarding birthing new life. It is not hard to see why.
This world is a world of maya, or illusion. The spiritual goal is to be liberated from the toils of maya, or a-vidya, and to be in the blissful state of oneness with Brahman. Woman is the principal means for life being brought into the sphere of maya. (It is very tempting for men to assume that they have no part in this sin!) A familiar aspect of this negativity is the idea entertained in almost every religious tradition that woman is a seductress.
By the way, this works in a subconscious and powerful way when society, including the judiciary, responds with a bias against victims of rape and gender-based discrimination.
From the perspective above, it seems there is an incompatibility between Sabarimala’s pratishtthaa -the deity- and women. Not women in general; but women in their generative phase. The feared ‘pollution’ of the ascetic celibacy in Sabarimala is a symbol of the apprehension that the core principle of oneness will be endangered. Otherwise, the assumption that the proximity of women can literally harm a deity is absurd. It is not woman per se, but woman as the medium of birth which plunges souls into the ocean (samsara) of maya and avidya that hold the peril to the principle of the deity.
Does all that make sense to everyone in the world? No, not necessarily. Actually, nothing makes sense outside of its context. That is why Hindus have a world of difficulty in understanding how symbolically eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus can be anything other than a symbol of cannibalism.
In the sphere of religion, everyone assumes, very funnily, that religious assumptions and conventions that make sense to oneself must necessarily do so for others as well.
Nothing is farther from the truth.
